


It ain't perfect, but it's okay for now

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Bechdel Test Pass, Christmas, Families of Choice, Family, Gen, POV Female Character, POV Jody Mills, Teenage Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 16:16:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3140750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're spending Christmas at the Mills family cabin, and it's Donna who gets through to Alex.</p><p> </p><p>Inspired by this exchange from Hibbing 911:</p><p>Jody: Why can't I get through to her?<br/>Donna: You let anybody through to you at that age?</p>
            </blockquote>





	It ain't perfect, but it's okay for now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frozen_delight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight/gifts).



“I wish we hadn’t come here,” Alex is saying, her voice muffled under the crackle and hiss of the dying fire. “This sucks.”

 

Jody stops, stands still in the hallway with her armload of wood.

 

“Oh, come on now,” Donna sounds just as impossibly cheerful as she did the day Jody met her. “So maybe this ain’t the most exciting place to spend Christmas but it sure as shootin’ don’t  _suck_.”

 

Jody’s nose and cheeks are stinging from being out in the cold and her arms are beginning to ache from the heavy load, but she doesn’t move. The anguish in Alex’s voice goes straight to her heart, freezes her down to her bones. She doesn’t know what to  _do,_ and she’d think  _This is what Hell feels like_  if a recent conversation with Sam Winchester hadn’t warned her off speaking lightly of such things.

 

“You don’t get it,” Alex's voice sounds brittle, cut through with her normal restless impatience. “It was  _my_  idea to come here. I  _wanted_  Jody to bring us here for Christmas. But it — it’s not…I don't know.”

 

It was true; coming to the cabin had been Alex’s idea and Jody hadn’t known what to say except _Okay._ After what they’d been through up here, when Alex mentioned going out to the old cabin Jody had half-expected her reason to be, _To to burn it down._ You could have knocked her over with a feather when Alex said instead, _For Christmas._

 

Inviting Donna was Alex’s idea, too. They hadn’t met in person before this but a few weeks after Hibbing, Donna called Jody’s cell while she was in the shower and Alex had answered and she and Donna had talked for twenty minutes before Alex handed over the phone. Later she’d asked,  _Mom…is Donna for real?_  It was the first time Alex called her  _Mom_  and it had floored her. She barely heard the question and couldn’t tell you what she’d answered, though she lay awake pondering it all night. When she finally asked Alex what she’d meant she got a shrug and an eye-roll and a vaguely distracted,  _She’s just way too perky to be real, right?_

 

“Never mind,” Alex is saying now, sniffing loudly. Jody edges forward to peer into the living room, sees Alex and Donna sitting side-by-side on the rug in front of the fire. Alex is hunched down under a scratchy old wool afghan that Jody’s grandmother knitted probably seventy years ago. “Forget it.”

 

“Oh, yah,” Donna scoffs, “you betcha. I’m just gonna forget finding you cryin’  all alone in here. That’s real likely.”

 

“I wasn’t  _crying_ —“

 

“How’s about this, you tell your auntie Donna what’s got you in such a state. Hm? Why’d you want to bring your mama out here so bad.”

 

“You’re  _not_  my aunt, and Jody’s  _not_  my mom.” Jody's heart knocks painfully against her ribs, but then she sees Donna turn herself to get a better look at Jody's adopted daughter, and from where she's hiding in the doorway she can just imagine the look on Donna’s face. And Alex’s laugh, soft and laced with tears though it is, brings a flicker of warmth to Jody’s heart. If Alex can still laugh at Donna’s  _Stuff-you_  look, Jody supposes there’s probably hope for her yet.

 

Alex wipes her nose on her sleeve and stares into the guttering fire, sniffs again, and pulls herself up straight. “I just thought we could have a good time and make some new memories here. That’s all. I thought…I figured she deserves it. To have a family Christmas here. Where she had used to have such good memories, until I showed up, until I—“

 

“Until you played bull in her china shop and ruined everything, you mean to say?”

 

Alex stiffens, turns to look at Donna, and the sliver of her face that Jody can see looks devastated, stuck dumb, and Jody is about to throw down the logs she’s just spent an hour chopping and barge in there like a bull herself. No one says shit like that to her kid and gets away with it. No one. Not even Donna.

 

And then Donna’s telling Alex, “You want to hear what someone said to me once, years back? He said,” Donna sucks in a deep breath and puffs out her chest, orating grandly. "‘Donna, to apologize for an imaginary wrong is to take the first step towards actually…um…actually doing somethin’ to be sorry for.’ Or at least it went kinda like that.” Donna shrugs and lowers her voice to say, “I tell ya, I was so blingoed on those jello shots, that whole night’s kind of a blur.” She laughs and shakes her head, then puts her arm around Alex’s shoulders to pull her close. Jody watches Alex fight against her for a split second — instinct — before melting the hug. “Kiddo, the only thing you’ve done to hurt Jody is to not tell her what’s goin’ on with you. You don’t gotta treat her like your diary or anything, but I tell ya, when it comes to you, she’s stumped. So throw the old lady a bone, eh? She ain’t a mind reader, ya know.”

 

Last time Jody talked to Donna before this impromptu Christmas camp-out it was two hours past curfew and she was sitting out on the front porch of her house in Sioux Falls, watching the road for Alex’s car. Breath fogging in the frigid November air, teeth chattering, thinking bleakly how she’d experienced more than her share of moments of complete helplessness. Hopelessness. The smooth cock and slide of the gun that would bring down her undead son; the taste of her own blood in her mouth, choking on nothing, dying for no reason; a rough wooden stake splintering between her ribs, sharding through her until there was nothing left in the world but pain’s bright echo. Sitting on cold stone steps and wondering...wondering...wishing and hoping against all better sense that there was a point to all this. All this, and Donna on the the other end of the line like a lighthouse.

 

_Remember when you said my life wasn’t all cupcakes?_

 

_You tryin’ to make me hungry, Jody-o?_

 

Jody had laughed, drawing her scarf tighter around her neck.

 

_Anything I can do to help you, there?_

 

Jody had covered her eyes, musty old mittens soaking up her tears, and was struck by a vivid memory of her grandmother and how she was always saying wool was the only thing worth wearing.  _Livin’ in a place like this it don’t rain but it pours. Gotta wear what’ll get wet and still keep you warm._  Grandma Mills. Wise woman, she was. Jody ended up telling Donna all about her, that night when she stayed out in 20-degree weather until her errant kid came home, stone-cold sober and refusing to say where she’d been.

 

“Well what was I supposed to tell Jody," Alex asks Donna, indignant in her teenaged way that someone she respected, a _grownup_ , wasn't giving her all the answers for free. "What was I supposed to say, that I wanted to go out to her old family cabin for a Brady Bunch family Christmas?”

 

“Well do you?”

 

“Do I what?”

 

“Do you want some Hollywood Christmas Special kind of a life?”

 

“I —" Alex pulls up short, shifts around and stares hard at Donna. "What do you mean?”

 

“I _mean_ ," Donna's looking back just as steady, her eyes wide and her voice oh-so-reasonable, the way that drove Jody crazy when they first met, the way that Jody's grown to love since then. "I mean, how did you think it was gonna go, coming out here like this? Were you trying to put on some fantasy show for Jody because you think she wants it?”

 

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Alex says. She pulls her hair free of its messy ponytail, shakes it out over her shoulders, then starts twisting it into a bun, half of it falling loose around her face before she gives up. “Jody took me in, you know, and she didn’t have to. She saved me, or whatever, and I…I mean, I owe her…you know. Everything. And I want to do right by her, but she thinks I’m…she wants me to be…” Alex drops her hands into her lap and blows out a harsh breath. “She thinks I’m some special  _angel_  or something and I’m  _not._  I want to be who she wants me to be but I’m just not and I don’t know how I’m supposed to…I dunno. Forget it, okay?”

 

“You think she wants you to be some, I dunno, some whiz kid? Some prodigy? H-E-double-hockey-sticks, kid! All you gotta do is be yourself and be  _happy_!”

 

“Oh,” Alex challenges, “that’s  _all_ , huh? Well what’s wrong with me, then, since that just sounds like a fucking walk in the park.”

 

“You’re darn tootin’ it’s a walk in the park! What, you think Jodes is some kind of tiger mom? She—hey.” Donna goes quiet and thoughtful, and Jody holds her breath, watching her reach out and brush Alex’s hair back from her face. “You know what? You’re right. I’m sorry, kiddo. I guess it’s easy to say ‘you’ve got it made’ when it’s not your life, huh.”

 

Alex breathes out, a long sigh and her voice is dull on the end of it. “I know life is hard for everyone. Honest, I get that. And I know I’m lucky, considering…”

 

“Considering you feel like you don’t deserve the salvation you got?” Donna pats her shoulder. “Would you believe me if I said I don’t think the universe gives a flying fudge about playing fair? Whether that’s in dishing out hard times or good. Way I see it, worryin’ over just deserts is way above my pay grade. It’s what you make of what you got that matters, and I think you need to take a good hard look-see at what you actually got. Hey,” Donna adds with a smile in her voice, “They oughta be payin' me to write fortune cookies, huh?”

 

And there it is: the look on Alex’s face that Jody’s pretty sure mirrors her own on the day she’d met Donna. That  _Who are you and how do you exist_  look and Jody is honestly grateful for it. After everything she’s been through and all the things she knows now, if Donna can still inspire in Alex that feeling of  _You are way too perky to be real_ , that’s a good thing in Jody's books.

 

“But,” Alex starts, then fidgets with the rug, re-crosses her legs and starts again. “Do you actually think that, I mean, does that actually work? There are  _monsters_  in the world, Donna, you know that.  _I_  was a monster! I did things…and now I’m still doing things. Things that I can’t tell—things she does’t want—but, she told me, she said I could be me, that I could leave my past behind and be my own person. But. Parts of that, parts of  _me_ , I just, I don’t know how to be what she wants me to be, and…”

 

When Alex trails off, Donna lays a hand on her shoulder and shakes her gently. “I just wish you could see how much she loves you, sweetie. She’d die for you, you know? And not because she has to, because she wants to.”

 

“Exactly!” Alex lashes out, pushing herself away from Donna. “See? That’s just it! She doesn’t have to! So  _why_? Why is she putting herself through this? I don’t deserve it, I haven’t  _done_  anything to make her love me like this! It’s not  _me_ she—“

 

“Alex,” Jody says, finally stepping into the room. “Alex, stop.”

 

“Jody—“

 

Alex’s eyes are wild, that familiar bright, flaring look that means she’s about to run and Jody is just so  _tired._

 

“Hey. That’s enough. You hear me? Just stop. Let’s all just take a breath, okay?”

 

Jody’s not sure what happens while drops the firewood in the box next to the hearth, stirs up the coals and arranges a half-dozen logs in the fireplace. But by the time the blaze is going again, Donna is sitting back in one of the armchairs and Alex, while still on the floor — not running yet — has pushed herself back and away from the fire, watching Jody with wary eyes.

 

“I found the Christmas ornaments, out in the barn. A couple of the boxes kinda smell like cat piss, but at least one is probably salvageable.” Jody nods at the bare evergreen tree they’d hauled in out of the woods yesterday and set up to lean in the corner. They hadn’t gone farther than draping it with lights before another argument broke out and Alex stormed off. “You wanna give it a shot?”

 

“Oh, heck yes!” Donna breathes, getting to her feet. Alex pushes herself up too and starts to follow Donna but Jody catches the sharp flash of a look between them and Alex stays where she is, looking sideways at Jody.

 

“Jody, I…” Alex trails off and Jody bites her tongue, holding herself back from interrupting her, telling her _It’s okay_  without knowing what  _It_  is. Alex looks panicked for a second, when she realizes Jody’s actually waiting on her to continue. Licking her lips, she blinks a few times, eyes darting to each corner of the room before returning to Jody’s face. She gives a small smile. “Nothing. Just. Let’s. Let’s have a good Christmas. Okay?”

 

It ain’t perfect. Alex’s voice shakes and she still has tears in her eyes and Jody is tired down to the soles of her feet and she misses her husband and her son like someone yanked out the very core of her. So it ain’t perfect, but for right now she thinks it’s enough when she takes Alex’s face in her hands and sees her smile grow wide, genuine. Jody feels an answering smile spread across her own face and she’s pulling Alex into her arms without second-guessing it. The girl clings to her and Jody lays a hand on the back of her head, holding her tight. Behind them, Donna plugs in the lights and Jody’s briefly dazzled by the array of reds and greens and golds. Donna grins at her over Alex’s shoulder and Jody mouths silently,  _Thank you._

 

“Merry Christmas, kid. Love you. Okay?”

 

“Yeah,” Alex laughs against her shoulder and squeezes her harder. “Yeah. Okay.”

 


End file.
